“I Can’t Remember But It Hurts”: Heartbreak as Trauma

[...]the wound of the mind[...] is not, like the wound of the body, a simple and healable event, but rather an event that[...]is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor. (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, 3-4) 1:50 AM, April 29, 2026 Finally, I start writing. Eyes heavy, mind busy, heart leaking, the usual. I am a patient trying to diagnose myself, but before the results are out, one thing is certain – the wound, the kind that prompts inquiry. As I said last time, I aim in this series to philosophise heartbreak. It is my way of making sense of an experience that seems like nonsense. I often find myself returning to the past, seeing phantoms where they don’t exist, remembering conversations, remembering the day everything blacked out. I need to give voice to the disturbance. Is it mere grief to be heartbroken, or could it be a form of trauma? Love Hurts; Body Feels There are existing studies on heartbreak. Yeah, you read that right. Researchers have dedicated time to understanding heartbreak as a biological, psychological, and social experience. If it were so trivial, there wouldn’t be millions of songs, films, novels, poems, artworks, and even philosophical treatises inspired by heartbreak. You don’t need recommendations. They are everywhere. So, it makes sense that scholars are paying attention. Evidence shows that heartbreak is not just a figurative expression, but also a reality that may be experienced physically (Tamam and Ahmad 6). In fact, there is a condition called cardiomyopathy (also, ‘broken heart syndrome’) that mimics heart attacks. It means that the heart’s muscles fail when the victim suffers sudden emotional stress (Shah RM et al.), like the death of a loved one or…breakup. Luckily, the condition is rare. What isn’t rare is how the pain of heartbreak tends to last much longer than physical pain, because memories of the hurt caused by a breakup with a loved one are more vivid than those of physical pain previously suffered (Chen et al.). Since heartbreak occurs within a social context, it is a form of social rejection. Forty participants who had recently experienced unwanted break-ups were involved in a study which scanned regions of their brains that sense physical pain. The researchers’ goal was to confirm whether those brain regions that respond to physical pain respond to social rejection in the same way. (Kross et al.). What did they discover? Social rejection and physical pain are similar not only because they are distressing, but also because “they share a common representation in somatosensory brain systems as well” (Kross et al. 15). In other words, the brain interprets social rejection as severe pain. When he or she confesses that the heartbreak hurts, it’s not an exaggeration: it is a real biological experience. A Psychological Wound that Spreads by Repeating Itself But the problem with heartbreak is not necessarily that it is a real pain. To be sure, stubbing a toe hurts, but I don’t see anyone crying over it for a full year. Within a few hours, you might have even forgotten it happened. Yes, some wounds are worse than others, and no one wants a missing limb. Still, there is something about a heartbreak that is always intense, extreme, and deep. It doesn’t limit itself to a spot; it spreads like cancer, consuming the entire mind, contaminating every memory, sensation, location, sound, food, smell, everything that relates to your time with that person, however remote it may seem. There is also the problem of invisibility. You can see and treat bodily wounds, but how do you treat a heartbreak?“In her absence I created her image[...]” (Mahmound Darwish)Another night of a thousand lights, I find myself retracing paths we used to walk together, in the shadows, under the street lamps, on the interlocked roads, the concrete pavements. Her phantom walks beside me, but I can’t touch her. Yet, she touches my heart, and it hurts like thorns drilling into flesh. When I actually see her, I avert my gaze, not because I don’t want to look at her, but because I want to – I want to block her path and request that she stop this cruel joke; I want to remember the feel of her warmth over my cold existence; I want the perfume scents that hang like a halo over her…the things we used to do. Seeing her, I am stabbed by the suddenness of memory. I squeeze it all into a single word – repetitiveness. Do you remember the day you died? The day they chose to leave you behind? The rain poured down in torrents, but your tears were heavier. The switch from assurance to rejection must have been sudden, like an unexpected Monday that came too soon. Caruth proposes certain characteristics of trauma, which I’d like to apply to this dislocating experience. Caruth says trauma is not necessarily located in the original violent event in the past, but rather, in the way its unassimilated nature returns to haunt the survivor in the future (in the form of repetitive but compulsive actions, recurring memories, nightmares, etc) (Caruth 4). She adds that trauma is “always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available” (Caruth 4). What she seems to be saying is that a trauma survivor knows that they are traumatised but can’t really explain why. In other words, they have little control over the repeated actions, dreams, or nightmares of trauma because, even though they can identify the event that led to trauma, they can’t identify when it became trauma in their minds. Traumatised Hearts Beat Different Maybe I can explain when the breakup happened, but the heartbreak itself never announced its arrival. It crept in and took root when I wasn’t looking. I have not comprehended what happened, why it happened, or the lessons I’m supposed to be learning from the unnecessary loss. All I know is I’ve lost myself, and the clarity I used to have has been disrupted by a reality I’m trying to wake up from – she chose to stay; then, she chose to depart. The contrast between the present absence and the past moments of togetherness, promises, and trust makes no sense to me (recall the unassimilated nature of trauma). Finally, the random moodiness, wicked longing, sudden anger, damned dreams, all these repetitions, suggest to me that heartbreak might be a romantic form of trauma, but I am in no hurry to stamp the tag of trauma on everything that has happened, even though the word seems to accurately capture the disturbances. Besides, I can’t speak for everyone. Works Cited Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Chen, Zoey, et al. “When Hurt Will Not Heal: Exploring the Capacity to Relive Social and Physical Pain.” Psychological Science, vol. 19, no. 8, 2008, pp. 789–95. <a class="tc-blue external-link" href="https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02158.x." rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.0215... </a> Darwish, Mahmoud. “In Her Absence I Created Her Image.” Poetry Foundation, 5 May 2023, <a class="tc-blue external-link" href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52555/in-her-absence-i-created-her-image-56d2311e1e253." rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52555/... </a> Shah, Rachit M., et al. “Fixing the Broken Heart: Pharmacologic Implications.” American Journal of Therapeutics, vol. 19, no. 3, Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, Dec. 2010, pp. e105–13, <a class="tc-blue external-link" href="https://doi.org/10.1097/mjt.0b013e3181f2ab74." rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">doi.org/10.1097/mjt.0b013e3181f2ab74. </a> Tamam, Sofina, and Asma Hayati Ahmad. “Love as a Modulator of Pain.” Malaysian Journal of Medical Sciences, vol. 24, no. 3, 2017, pp. 5–14, <a class="tc-blue external-link" href="https://doi.org/10.21315/mjms2017.24.3.2." rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">doi.org/10.21315/mjms2017.24.3.2. </a> Kross, Ethan, et al. “Social Rejection Shares Somatosensory Representations with Physical Pain.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 108, no. 15, 12 Apr. 2011, pp. 6, 270–75. <a class="tc-blue external-link" href="https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1102693108." rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1102693108. </a>

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